Noam Chomsky "Grammar, Mind and Body- A Personal View"

I'd like to introduce dr. graça who will be introducing dr. Chomsky good afternoon everybody since we took so so long to organize this is a self-organizing crowd promise that the better society is possible I will just cut to the chase rapidly there will be a talk on March 1st by David Simon creator of The Wire another one of these conversations Angela Davis will be here on April 18 5:30 as well actually I she will be in this room and David will be in a gilded horn recital the format of today's talk norm will give his talk and then there will be microphones in the middle so try to line up etc Norbert this guy over here big guy is going to sit here and bell chat and you will get your chance so I could tell you a million different things but look if you are in this place and you don't know for Noam Chomsky is you're not just in the wrong talk you're in the wrong planet so let's just go directly to him it's to me is a dear friend dear mentor inspiration beyond belief so welcome now it's all yours thank you I've been asked to offer some personal reflections about the several notions grammar mind and body and being obedient by nature I'd like to comply but it's and I'll try to do so but it's not easy one reason is that I'm skeptical about the status of all three of these concepts at least as they're conventionally understood so I'll try to explain why and then go on say a few things about how I think they can be usefully reconstructed so take the first grammar I'll keep here to common and traditional usage a grammar a descriptive grammar is supposed to be an account of a language or maybe a text that you can use to learn the language grammars that kind go back to classical antiquity and they contain a good deal of information and a lot of insight but they can't come close to being actual accounts of the language for very simple reason nowhere near enough is understood for the same reason a theory of any other complex system I'm saying the visual system or insect navigation or whatever you want it's bound to be incomplete to understand the nature and the workings of such systems is always a very hard scientific problem very far from being resolved it's interesting that it's often assumed to be straightforward in the case of language not in the other cases so we constantly hear that a strange failure of modern linguistics is that hasn't provided a complete grammar of any language complete theory of any language one doesn't hear claims that modern science has failed because it hasn't provided a complete account of the mammalian visual system or of the navigation system of bees or something like that or anywhere near it and I think there's a reason for the distinction and it has a long history in fact it goes back to a belief actually dogma might be better that the workings of the mind have to be transparent for contemporary philosophy it's often a definition as something is in the mind if and only if you can it's accessible to that the introspection understandable doctrine but completely untenable it was thought traditionally you go back centuries that the study of psychology and the mind would be much easier than physics because it's all open to you all you have to do is look well you can learn a lot about language from a traditional or a pedagogical amer but the reason for that is they already know the answers to the most fundamental questions and you know the answer is because your human being and you have the human language capacity which enables you to that's what enable you to acquire your language in the first place from scattered and complex data and it can help you use the data more or less organized may be presented in something that's called a grammar of the language it wouldn't be too far from the mark to say that grammars are collections of idiosyncrasies the things you can't know just by being human so you have to pick them up from data it's in a rather similar way if you have say a manual for teaching tennis it won't go into the instructions that you and from your motor cortex to your arm to lift up the racket and the a theory of motor organization is not going to care how you get your ball past the opponent on the first serve in general the scientific theories are almost complementary to the manuals of instruction they deal with different things what you don't care about for the manual and structure of instruction is exactly what you do care about for the scientific theory that's something like that is true also with regard to the what's called the grammar of a language and what a linguist interested in the nature of the language or language generally would be interested in so take one other example there's a one of the more interesting discoveries of perceptual psychology not too long ago is Shimon Ullman 'he's rigidity principle what this means is if a subject is shown several presentations of a few points of light in sequence what the person sees is a is a rigid object in motion the constructed image is just produced reflexively on the basis of inner resources but the person who sees it hasn't the slightest idea of what the doing or how or why and similarly no grammar of English what is called a grammar of English but I'm not talking about a scientific grammar now but what's called a grammar of English it doesn't even try to account for enumerable the very elementary facts about language so give me a couple examples to make it concrete so take the sentence he wondered if the mechanics fixed the cars you can ask how many cars and how many mechanics that's respectively how many cars did he wonder if the mechanics fixed or how many mechanics did he wonder if fixed the well think about those the first of them expresses appropriately the intended thought but the second doesn't express the intended thought there's no problem with the thought but the language is so constituted that you just can't express it in a simple way the language design requires you to construct some more complex circumlocution well what are called grammars of English don't deal with matters like that let alone try to explain them and for someone who's trying to learn English that's no problem at all because they already know the answer just as the person who's learning to play tennis doesn't have to be told how to send signals from the motor cortex to the arm the were set to follow the trajectory of a ball that's part of your nature and similarly a person doesn't have to be taught how to perceive a rigid object in motion even when there's no object and there's no motion receive it anyway cases I mentioned well take a take an even simpler example so take the very brief sentence kind of Eagles that fly swim and ask what it means it asks whether the Eagles can swim it doesn't ask whether they can fly similarly we can say our Eagles that fly swimming which means is it the case that Eagles that fly are swimming but we can't say our Eagles that flying swim meaning is it the case that Eagles that are flying swim again the thought is fine fine thought I just expressed it proper way but the language doesn't allow it to be expressed without a complex circumlocution and again there's no problem for the person learning English because the human language capacity reflexively yields that result just as it determines that you see a rigid object in motion and of course grammar books don't try to teach you anything like that they just confuse you if they did in fact nobody even noticed it well it's in fact if you think about it the facts are kind of puzzling in each of these two in these sentences let's say our they are again our Eagles that flying or are our Eagles that fly swimming Eve our Eagles that swimming fly the verb at the beginning the verbal element at the beginning has to pick up a verb inside the sentence to be associated with and it doesn't do it the easy way the computationally easy way would be just pick up the first one now then you would say our Eagles that flying swim which expresses a good expressive fine thought if the language allowed you to say it and that's computationally simple is run through the sequence of words find the first verb that's the one you attach it to but you don't do that you do something much more complex you have to determine the structure of the sentence and then find the main verb and that's a computationally complex task but that's the way language works and we would for the science of language you'd like to understand why it necessarily works that way there's some pretty good reasons well puzzles like that are all over the place in fact if you open a book at random you'll find plenty of them and a language has been studied very productively for literally for millennia back to classical Greece and India but until the dawn of modern linguistics about 60 years ago things like that were never even noticed and it's not surprising we know the answer is instinctively so for practical purposes it's quite unnecessary even to notice the fact or to try to understand how language works apart from scientific curiosity that is and it's much the same as in visual perception and much else and a further reason is that scientific curiosity is not so easy to arouse most of what's happening around us it just seems obvious so you don't seek to explain it of course through the ages inquiring minds have sought explanations that we have names for those those quests we call them a religion or myth or magic or in an organized more organized and systematic form we call them science there was a substantial leap forward in scientific inquiry particularly from the early 17th century it's often called the Galilean revolution and an important part of that leap that moved forward was the recognition the things that seemed obvious were in fact very puzzling like the example that I just mentioned so for millennia that takes suppose for example that I'm holding a cup in my hand and there's boiling water in it and as a cover if I take the cover off the steam goes up and if I let it go the cup goes down so why does the steam go up and the cup go down well there had been an answer for millennia literally they're going to their natural place end of story steam goes up cup goes down Galileo and others of his period allowed themselves to be puzzled about that actually really the first time and when they allowed them to be puzzled they found that it's not obvious and first of all your intuitions about how it works are just wrong as soon as you begin to investigate it well that willingness to be puzzled is typically a first step towards understanding if you don't just say look it looks obvious finished then maybe get some understanding well efforts to solve the puzzle the kind that I just mentioned puzzles about motion motion they led to a mode of explanation I was given a name it was called the mechanical philosophy philosophy just met science so mechanical science the mechanical philosophy had a goal they wanted to dispense with the kind of mysticism of the neo scholastic science philosophy forms flitting through the air sympathies and antipathies and other occult ideas and it wanted to keep to what is firmly grounded in common sense understanding and intelligible - common sense understanding and the there was a conception the conception was that something is intelligible to us if you can give an account of it in terms of a mechanical construction where mechanical means the kind of thing that a skilled artisan could construct and that's what the world is something that in fact a super skilled artisan did construct so now we have to give explanations in terms of mechanical constructions that we can provide all of this was stimulated by the technology of the time this is a period when there were very complex mechanical clocks being made or models of a duck digesting or the gardens the Royal Gardens we could walk through and the voices spoke to you and statues stood up all kind of amazing things happen in fact these the stimulus of the artifacts at the time is not unlike the stimulus today from what's done by computers kind of stimulates the imagination and can lead you astray both cases well the mechanical philosophy of mechanical science provided a criterion of intelligibility if there's no mechanical explanation there's no understanding I'll quote one of the leading Galileo scholars Peter matcha mean he says that by adopting the mechanical philosophy and initiating the modern scientific revolution Galileo had forged a new model of intelligibility for human understanding with new criteria for coherent explanations of natural phenomena based on the conception of the world as just an elaborate machine where again machine means something that an artisan can construct and for Galileo and in fact other leading figures of the early Scientific Revolution a true understanding requires a mechanical model that's a again a device that an artisan can construct and we could take apart so intelligible to us Galileo tried throughout his life to achieve this goal and mostly failed he rejected traditional theories of the tides because he said we cannot duplicate them by means of appropriate artificial devices and at the end of his life his inability to find mechanical explanations for cohesion attraction other simple phenomena it led Galileo to quote in to reject the vain presumption of understanding everything and even worse he finally concluded there is not a single effect in nature such that the most ingenious theorist can arrive at a complete understanding of it meaning an intelligible account in mechanical terms actually that turned out to be true in a deep sense that he didn't anticipate well scientists didn't give up at that point the founders of modern science continued to try to seek intelligible explanations the most famous and important was Descartes thought of as philosophers primarily physicists and biologists and so on he no distinctions among the sciences in those days he believed that he had succeeded in fact he claimed to provide a mechanical account of all phenomena in nature almost he noticed that some aspects of the world remained recalcitrant but in particular human higher mental faculties what Aristotle long before it called the rational soul and the effects that the case that Descartes found most convincing was a normal use of language what sometimes called the creative aspect of language use in normal language use we produce new sentences freely and without awareness of any novelty they are not caused by situations circumstances but they're appropriate circumstances which is a crucial difference not understood but quite a crucial difference there it goes on indefinitely there's no limit to it there intelligible to others who realize that they could have expressed the same thought themselves and this a collection of properties Bickhart argued correctly in fact lies beyond mechanism now in the substance philosophy of his day that many he then followed normal scientific principles and here's something that doesn't fall within the mechanism so we need a new principle kind of a creative principle and in the substance philosophy that meant we need new substance we need what's called the thinking substance race Kogi thoughts which is alongside the extended substance substance is just something that can exist independently of other things so we have a material substance extended substance and that we have a thinking substance and then the next problem is to find out the properties of the thinking substance the properties of mind and to show how it links to the other substance to the material world actually explored those topics some of it survives not much so we don't know exactly what he achieved because he destroyed a lot of it after he learned about the fate of Galileo was worried about it so we don't really know what a lot of what he said or found what he said well there were this imposed a lot of other tasks incidentally a very serious problem that arose right at the time was that this was the rising period of Empire and explorers were finding all sorts of strange creatures like orangutangs and Native Americans and it wasn't obvious which of them were humans and it was extremely it's extremely important point because if you human you have an immortal soul and if you're not human you're a machine so it's quite significant to determine which of these creatures are fall into which category and there's great deal of debate and discussion about this my favorite actually my favorite when there is a very good Descartes scholar of late Harry Bracken he presented some quite interesting arguments that these so-called rationalist assumptions have provided a barrier against racism you couldn't be a rationalist and a racist because you either have a soul or you don't have it you can't have half a soul so there's no gradations among humans there's just a break between humans and machines well given the crucial role that language played in these concerns its there was another crucial quest these creatures have a language like ours there are a lot of debates about this actually one of my favorites was suggestion by Louie Racine son of the playwright he suggested that Apes he had a proof that apes are really more intelligent than us and the reason is they don't talk because it and there's a reason for that too they know that if they did talk we would enslave them so they keep quiet more seriously their carts followers so called minor Cartesians devised interesting experiments to try to determine if some other creature has this capacity as the linguistic skills these tests which are kind of interesting are precursors to what today is called the Turing test named after one of the great 20th century mathematicians and computer scientists the Turing test is generally regarded as a test to determine whether a machine can think Turing himself dismissed the question of whether a machine can think as in his words to meaningless to deserve discussion it's a short paper eight page paper he wrote which is the basis for all of this and that's one line and it unfortunately nobody paid attention to it and the failure to pay attention to his conclusion I think has led to a huge amount of wasted effort and discussion but it's enough to point out that the rather similar seventeenth-century precursors we're dealing with a much more serious complications kind of of the Turing test type they were dealing with a much more serious issue and not just how to apply the word think but what are the constituents of the world the metaphysical question what's the world made oh well the framework of early modern science give rise to a significant and meaningful mind-body problem so the material world could presumably be explained by mechanical science but there aspects of the world that could not like creative aspect of language use so you have to postulate mind soul same thing along side of body and investigate its nature and investigate the interactions of the two systems this point of view this kind of picture has it does accord pretty well with our kind of common sense picture of what things are like and that's of course as much earlier origins in different terms the Galilean revolution took the long tradition about these of these debates and reconstructed it within a serious scientific framework at the same time laying the basis for modern science well unfortunately it didn't last very long all of this was shattered by the end of the century Isaac Newton much to his dismay and disbelief refuted the mechanical philosophy that's what his great work was he showed that nothing falls within its range that is there are no machines there's nothing physical there's nothing material even the most elementary phenomena of nature the planetary orbits motion of the tides that can't be explained in mechanical terms so to account for the phenomena of the world it's necessary he art showed to appeal to what were considered occult forces the same kinds of mysticism that early modern science tried to expunge you know the sympathies antipathies and so on it was necessary to appeal to mysterious forces of attraction repulsion and the like which are literally unintelligible as intelligibility was understood and also as intelligibility is understood in terms of our common sense understanding Newton regarded these conclusions his own conclusions as an utter absurdity so absurd he said that no serious scientist could entertain them for a moment and in fact he spent the rest of his life trying to find a way around the dilemma he failed many other great scientists of the day and later tried as well also failed finally the task was just abandoned was never solved it was abandoned the the and with the abandonment of the task went the only coherent notions of machine and matter body physical many of that array of concepts so the standards of intelligibility for science were lowered instead of trying to find to develop a intelligible theories of the world an intelligible account of the world the task of early modern science there's a much more limited goal namely to develop intelligible theories theories that we can understand even if we can understand what they're about and that's actually modern science that's a far different matter from early modern science and a much more limited goal and I think this should be regarded as a very significant shift in the history of thought by the time we get to the modern thinkers people like say Bertrand Russell who knew the sciences very well the modern sciences he dismisses the very idea of an intelligible world as his words an absurdity and when you read what he writes about this he constantly places the word intelligible in quotes to highlight the absurdity of the quest well though Newton himself regarded his great conclusions as an absurd others understood that they had enormous significance David Hume described Newton in his history of England as the greatest and rarest genius that ever arose for the ornament and instruction of the species his greatest achievement was that while he seemed to draw the veil from some of the mysteries of nature he showed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy and he thereby restored nature's ultimate secrets to that obscurity in which they ever did and ever will remain that's a pretty far-reaching claim and I think an accurate one but very commonly denied it's commonly claimed we can understand everything if we just try it was understood in the 18th century what can't be true well there were other leading thinkers at the time who reached somewhat similar conclusions sometimes on different grounds John Locke for example he observed that motion has effects which we can in no way conceive motion able to produce as Newton in fact had demonstrated shortly before and so he went on since we remain in incurable ignorant of what we desire to know about matter and its effects therefore no science of bodies is within our reach and we can only appeal to the arbitrary determination of that all-wise agent who has made them to be and to operate as they do in a way wholly above our weak understanding to conceive that's Locke well if you apart from the kind of resigned invocation of the deity the conclusions are now commonplace among serious historians of science so Alexander quarrei when a leading modern historians of science he pointed out that Newton demonstrated that a purely materialistic pattern of nature is utterly impossible and a purely materialistic or mechanistic physics is utterly impossible to mathematical physics requires the admission into the body of science of incomprehensible and inexplicable facts facts and quote suppose imposed upon us by what we observe and discover well what then happens to the mind-body problem there's a standard contemporary view of this it was articulated clearly by the influential Oxford philosopher that Gilbert Ryle in his famous book 60 years ago I called concept of mind if I can add another personal note that was Virtual Bible when I was a grad student in philosophy at the time penn and harvard Ryle dismissed the concept of mind as with ridicule he assured us that modern science had gotten rid of the mystical belief that there is what he called a ghost in the machine you know mind inside the machine just the machine no ghosts well what actually happened was almost the opposite that Newton had exercised the machine didn't touch the ghost he left the ghost intact so des cartes work on the mind was untouched and undisturbed by Newton's critique but his mechanical count account of what was considered the physical world that was demolished and not just his account but any possible account because he should there is no physical world so there can't be any improvement at least as the concept physical material collection related concepts at least they were understood in early modern science which is pretty much in accord with intuition furthermore these concepts have not been replaced by new note so we're still in the dark about what any of them mean they're used so people talk about physical material and so on but they're kind of honorific terms they reinforce lis in our efforts to understand the world just as we sometimes talk about the real truth you know not implying that there's no other kind of truth it's now often remarked that 20th century physics compels us to accept notions that are hopelessly counterintuitive curved space-time a quantum entanglement the beginning of time much more but the fact is that the fundamental problem goes back much earlier goes back to the early days of modern science as was very clearly understood at the time and later forgotten as the absurdities were just kind of absorbed into our familiar science well as Locke and Hume and others recognized at once intuition and common-sense understanding are not reliable guides and in fact can leave it lead us completely astray and furthermore with the collapse of cartesian science that's science as it was understood in the modern period it came to be understood that in empirical matters we cannot hope for certainty only plausibility so we search for the best account we can we can find we know that however well confirmed it is it may turn out to be wrong so there are no firm foundations for empirical knowledge no foundationalism of any kind that was understood in the 17th century and since it was so well understood that I must say I find it a little odd these days to read critiques of foundationalism in contemporary literary theory and cultural studies as if such a position that could be upheld it and at least in the empirical world it's been known for centuries maybe in mathematics and logic but even there it's understood that the reach is very limited well with the machine exercised no more machine what is there to say about the ghost lock actually had quite a sensible proposal it's known as lock suggestion in the history of philosophy you simply have to assume that the constituents of the world whatever they are have the capacity of thought alongside of other capacities that are unintelligible to common-sense understanding like action and distance action without contact the way Locke put it back to the theological framework just as God had added to the world inconceivable properties of motion he might have super added to the world a Faculty of thinking this is Locke's idea of thinking matter it was pursued vigorously through the 18th century culminated and quite sophisticated work by a great chemist philosopher Joseph Priestley he developed in some detail his conclusion on quote him that properties termed mental reduced somehow to the organical structure of the brain that similar conclusion had been stated by human others later by Darwin and it's almost inescapable after the collapse of the mechanical philosophy mechanical science it's well if you to restate Locke's conclusion without the theological trappings explorations of the mental aspects of the world should proceed alongside of exploration of chemical optical mechanical and other aspects of the world it's only in this sense that the concepts of mind and and matter remains far as I can see well there has been a persistent goal of the general project of the sciences and you can ask why but it is a persistent goal to try to unify enquiries into various branches of science to show to take what has always been the most crucial case to show how chemistry and physics are related problem goes back centuries it was it throughout this whole period it was taken for granted that this unification of chemistry and physics would have to proceed by reduction of chemistry to physics that is by showing that the laws of chemistry that can be expressed in purely physical terms in terms of physics well in no way was ever found to do this and well into the 20th century that was interpreted as by the most prominent scientists as showing that chemistry isn't really a substantive science it's just a mode of calculation it provides merely class victory symbols that summarize the observed course of reaction quoting a standard contemporary history of chemistry America's first Nobel Prize winner in the 1920s chemist he dismissed talk about the real nature of chemical bonds as what he called metaphysical twaddle they're nothing more than a very crude method of representing certain facts about chemical reactions a mode of representation only and the reason is they can't be expressed in terms of physics in 1927 the Bertrand Russell observed quite correctly that chemical laws cannot at present be reduced to physical laws the phrase at present because he took for granted that the explanatory gap as it's called in the philosophical literature would be overcome as understanding proceeded by reducing chemistry to physics well that belief proved to be incorrect the chemistry was never reduced to physics and the reason was that the physics of the day the 1920s was wrong it was soon radically modified by the quantum theoretical at that point of virtually unchanged chemistry was in fact unified with the new physics but that's not reduction that's unification something quite different if you look at the debates by leading scientists and philosophers about the status of chemistry as recently as 80 years ago they're strikingly similar to debates today about the status of mental entities and properties so some argue commonly that the principles of mind and the entities postulated are modes of representation only and will not be part of science until the crucial explanatory gap is overcome by reducing the theory of mind to the neurosciences there's a kind of standard slogan philosophy psychology that the mind is just the neurological at a more abstract level and so we'll get it down to we explain it in neuro physiological terms and today right now you read if the thesis of what's called the new biology that thing's mental indeed minds are emergent properties of brains though these emergencies emergencies are produced by principles that we do not yet understand I'm quoting distinguished neuroscientist Vernon mal castle he's summarizing the guiding themes of the decade of the brain but okay that ended the 20th century devoted to the brain that's what they finally concluded well the phrase we do not yet understand that might well suffer the same fate as Russell's similar comments about chemistry seven years earlier other prominent contemporary scientists and philosophers quoting have presented essentially the same thesis as what they call an astonishing hypothesis of the new biology a radical new idea in the philosophy of mind the bold assertion that mental phenomena are entirely natural and caused by the neurological or physiological activities of the brain opening the door to novel and promising inquiries and a rejection of Cartesian mind-body dualism and so on in fact all of these reiterate in virtually the same words formulations of centuries ago after the traditional mind-body problem became unform evil with the disappearance of the only coherent notion of body physical material and so on for example Joseph Priestley's conclusions in the 18th century which I quoted before virtually the same words the today's repetitions of the conclusions of two centuries ago have much less repetition of justification for one thing because of the repetitions the same the same thing another is that they're forgotten precursors had a basis for their beliefs a solid basis namely newton's demolition of the mechanical philosophy and another reason is that you'd think that we ought to be able to understand that reduction is just one form of unification now surely after the recent history of chemistry well let's turn to the modern study of language during the past 60 years sometimes called the generative Enterprise it's actually recapitulated a lot of this history without as much awareness as it should have had and should have today in my opinion so much as in the early days of the modern scientific revolution the generative Enterprise began with a willingness to be puzzled by what appear to be simple and obvious phenomena like the examples I mentioned earlier it was very quickly discovered just as in the early scientific revolution that these are all over the place and that's almost always the case if we allow us our selves to be puzzled by what seems to be simple and obvious I think it's fair to say that that that step that willingness to be puzzled is the opens what opens the door to a serious inquiry that goes beyond the surface just as it did in the early modern sciences the generative Enterprise also adopted the carts observations about the creative aspect of language use at first without awareness since the history of these matters had long been forgotten and when even mentioned was just typically dismissed as old-fashioned mysticism without understanding it the actually and the scholarly literature pretty scandalous left to say the the generative Enterprise took as its primary task to discover the mechanisms that enter into this remarkable ability creative aspect of language use which does seem to be one crucial foundation for what distinguishes humans from other organisms but notice that the discovery of the mechanisms it's very challenging scientific task in itself but even if you discover them which is a long way off that would still leave us very far from understanding how they're put to use in a creative way that's a question that's barely even on the thousands of inquiry well thanks to discoveries in the formal sciences logic and mathematics that were just coming to be understood 60 years ago it was possible for the first time to develop quite substantial proposals to show how the design of language could satisfy might satisfy some fundamental conditions that trace back to classical antiquity such as the fact that language somehow links sound with meaning and in fact does so over an unbounded range again a very obvious fact which doesn't seem to have been recognized for centuries in fact until the early modern scientific revolution I can't find any reference to it primarily by Descartes but also indirectly by Galileo shortly before him this means that every language has must be consists of a finite it's in the brain finite computational system that yields an infinite array of structured expressions each of which provides instructions for other organic systems of the sensorimotor system for externalization as sound or sign or some other modality and the the systems of thought interpretation planning and the like well when our fair amounts been learned about how such systems are constituted and how they function and most important about the limited range of options that the mind makes available and even sometimes why there are such limits these are results that will go into it that provides some solutions to puzzles of the kind that I mentioned at the outset at which again are all over the place well there are many further tasks one is unification with the brain sciences that might turn out to be reduction although very few people should be surprised if the course turns out to be rather like chemistry worth bearing in mind that physics a century ago was way more advanced than the brain sciences are today and yet it had to be radically modified before it could be unified with chemistry now there's quite important work underway in neurolinguistics difficult promising field but I think that few doubt that unification is pretty remote prospect well still another task is to inquire into how the language capacity might have evolved oddly this is a very popular topic there's a flow of books and articles pouring out regularly and it is very odd if you think about it for many reasons that one reason is that far simpler questions are barely studied because they're understood to be much too difficult for example the evolution of the varied communication systems of hundreds of species of bees a second reason why it's odd is that the methods of evolutionary biology are not available in the case of language you can't do comparative work of course you have no fossil record that's been forcefully argued by prominent evolutionary biologists who are just ignored another even more fundamentally reason why it's odd is that the evolution of some system say call it X any system X it can proceed only as far as you've told us what X is okay so you can't study the evolution of the I if you don't know what an AI is it sounds kind of simple but if you take a look at the numerous publications in real libraries on evolution of language then I mean they almost barely try to say what languages that beyond the most superficial aspects in fact a careful look show with very rare exceptions they're not even studying the evolution of language they're studying the evolution of communication the speculations about the evolution of communication totally different matter and though I don't pursue it here I think there's good evidence that communication is a secondary aspect even if language use and not a significant factor in language design well despite these problems I think there's at least something to say about these matters and we can hope that in the future there will be more if the topic is seriously pursued well another topic in this case very actively and productively pursued particularly in the past few decades is acquisition of language how does a child acquire its language it's actually quite a remarkable feat there's a lot to be puzzled about there to only barely beginning to be investigated even the very first stage is remarkable so think of a newborn infant it's immersed in what William James famously called a blooming buzzing confusion just a massive unorganized data somehow the newborn infant manages to extract out of this confusion data that bear on language of course reflexively and almost instantaneously fact in part prenatally we now know how that's done is largely unknown and it's only very recently even become a topic of study it seems pretty clear that it's not a property of the human auditory system and one reason is that other sense of sensory modalities seem to work just as well another reason is that it's recently been discovered that the higher Apes appear to have essentially the same auditory system is humans even attuned to the same phonetic features that enter into human sound systems but they don't detect anything about language of course so there must be some form of internal computational processing involved from the very first instant and the course of growth and development from that point on also are quite remarkable when studying closely as has been done in recent years for the first time ok we'll all have to stop at that point it should be obvious that this is only the barest sketch of some of the prospects for the study of language mind and body as they're reconstituted if we pay some attention to what has been discovered in recent centuries and if we pursue John Locke's modest ambition quote him to be employed as an under labourer in clearing the ground a little and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge okay so we're going to take questions for a half-hour I think there are two sets two microphones here if someone wants to ask a question please line up and I'll call you on you to please speak clearly into the microphone so everyone can hear okay thank you go ahead oh okay everyone hear me I'm not going anywhere hi thanks for your talk so as I understand it you're talking about Locke's modest modest proposal to as I understand it answer the house of life and not necessarily the whys so you know that's that's kind of a departure from what a lot of us think of that science can really do for us you know tell us everything and I think what we what you discuss kind of shows us that we can't know everything from it so I'd like to you know ask what you personally take from the study of science what is it really worth to you why do you do it well first of all it's you're quite right it's very commonly believed that we can in principle understand everything there's that can give you references to be liked but it's a very standard thesis in the sciences and in philosophy of science by leading people that's a very strange thesis because it was understood centuries ago that it can't be true Humes of all the people who make these statements also worship David Hume as one of the kind of founders of modern thought but he very clearly pointed out as I quoted that while Newton did remove some of the mysteries of nature he left other mysteries in state where they will always remain mysterious to us and he had reasons for it often it's argued that on evolutionary grounds we have simply evolved so that we can answer every possible question that's part of you know natural selection selected us to answer questions I mean that goes back a long time charles sanders peirce argued that and all the way to the present but totally crazy I mean hunter-gatherers did not evolve to solve problems of mechanics you know our little own quantum theory so this is nothing to that and that's we're stuck with there are things we can understand there are limits to understanding and we can we might even in principle discover what the limits are it's not contradictory it's hard but it's not contradictory to think that inquiry into the nature of human intelligence might explain why it can deal with some things and not deal with other things but to take a crude and oversimplified with maybe not false example we can humans can deal with determinacy a lot of science deals with determinacy can deal with randomness a lot of work on randoms but maybe there are things that don't fall within randomness indeterminacy like for example the creative aspect of languages which doesn't seem to be determined by circumstances and obviously isn't random but is appropriate to circumstances and is understood to be and what that gap is is pretty obscure we recognize it all the time you know but that doesn't mean we can understand it maybe it falls beyond the bounds of human science that's possible but and incidentally this extends to choice generally not just to its dramatic in the case of language that was the courts point but so what's the point of science to understand as much as you can we want to understand as as we can about the nature of things it seems worthy objective hi can you hear me oh hi mr. Chomsky what a pleasure um so I know a few languages and one of them is a American Sign Language and you're talking about infants and it's been shown that even before they can develop the ability to speak they can actually learn to sign and understand quite a few signs so I'm wondering how does sign language factor into this have you I mean when you study cell languages and and so when you're fluent it in the language I find that when I don't think I can sign more fluently than when I actually try to think and formulate what I'm trying to say so how does that factor into it well let's go back with another personal reflection since I was asked to do that where this stuff all began about 60 years ago there were it was actually three students at Harvard three grad students who didn't believe anything that was going on and started trying to think about alternatives one was Erik Lana Berg who went on to found biology of language we were all friends Eric started studying thing he actually it was interested in the language of the linguistic achievements of people kids were deaf and blind so he went to the perkins school of the blind famous school and in boston where they teach deaf children language at that time and for long afterwards even still today often there was a very strict oralist tradition you had children who were deaf had to learn to lip read they were not allowed to learn sign and the logic was that if they didn't if they learned sign they wouldn't be able to integrate into the general community so the teacher would be drilling the kids in lip-reading and Eric notice that a Sousa teacher turned to the board the kids would start going like this they'd obviously invented a sign language that were communicating with each other inside but when the teacher wasn't looking you know familiar with that phenomena but and that it was kind of left hanging for a long time but in the last since about the 1980s there's been serious study of it has been discovered that a sign language is another language so for example at my department at MIT there's a course on that what's called exotic languages meaning anything but in the european language and it's kind of meant in quotes and one year a couple of years ago they just used sign like it's just another language the acquisition is very similar to spoken language the to the extent that the brain aspect the brains you know the neural aspects are understood it seems to be the same which was a big surprise it was assumed by most people that sign language that signing would be mostly in the tech community registered in the right hemisphere because it's visual but turns out it's the list left hemisphere same place as spoken language so some kind of analytic system in there somewhere that doesn't care what modality it comes in and some of the things are pretty amazing but by now it's just another language so this nothing worse a hi absolutely there are many sign language yeah quite a lot it's not just one night yeah well thank you for the talk so one question I had was you talked very briefly at the end about so the difference between the general study of communication and just language and so for those processes that you would associate with actual true language how separable would you consider those from just the general cognitive machinery that goes behind the one world the cognitive machine yeah you know the overall sort of cognitive framework you know if you had some machine say that was able to produce models of sensory data and try to communicate them would you expect some sort of you know are there certain inevitabilities to the language process in terms of useful transmission of information or is it hard to say it's like saying why do we assume that there's anything special about the visual visual system and I suppose we the mammalian visual system I mean after all if we had some computational mechanism was able to construct the models based on data in the world why shouldn't behave like the mammalian visual system of course the insect visual system doesn't you know and it's kind of the same with language I mean it's so incidentally what you're saying is a very common belief for again like in the cognitive sciences I wouldn't say it's an orthodoxy but it's very commonly believed that there can't be anything special about language it's just a collection of an array of cognitive processes you go back about 60 years and the same view was held the language is just a set of behaviors like all other behaviors at that time it would be by you know developed by conditioned response and so on and now it's by what or cognitive processes are around well you know it's conceivable just like it's conceivable for the visual system it's kind of interesting that it's not entertained for the visual system and the reasons for not entertaining it or at least as strong in the case of the language system and if it's just a set of cognitive processes why doesn't it 8 - it you don't they have cognitive processes it's not the input system because they've pretty much same input system for a long time it was thought that it's because they don't have an articulatory system but they work on sign shows that that can't be right the Apes can sign they just can't do anything with that data they're not designed for it but just as we can't carry out the kind of navigation that a that an ant can we're not designed for so yes you can I mean the thesis is common as far as I know it has no evidence for it and it's highly unlikely it's if unless you believe what movie rezian said that apes can really do it but they're smart enough not to because they know will enslave me I can't think of any other organ for you but yes it's common but there's not much point proposing and it's a common in the cognitive sciences and my view is it ought to be eliminated I mean if you can show how some capacity can be developed by general mechanisms great we'll all be excited but just to say well maybe they can I don't see any point in that in any aspect of biology thank you mr. Chomsky um I'd like to touch on just kind of going back to what he said about the difference between communication and the study of language and how you think because um as I understand it some neurologists believe that a lot of emotional communication comes from kind of a musical expression in the right brain well more data based communication comes from language in the left brain how do you think your concept of language explains how language can express emotion in communication well you know it's kind of another dogma that language and communication are about the same thing but if you think about it it's extremely implausible for one thing you almost any behavior you carry out communicate something a gesture the hairstyle you know almost anything so sure language behavior also communicates something the first of all beyond that almost all language is not involved in communication and we all know that I mean you can't go one minute without talking to yourself and it takes a tremendous effort of will not to be doing whatever you're doing when what's going on in your head well that's plainly not communication you're doing it yourself that's about 99.9% of the use of language now in fact when you really think that's never been investigated but if you introspect about it as it could be investigated seriously you know from kind of third person point of view but hasn't been so you can only sort of think about it yourself but I can I tell you my introspections you can figure out yours but my introspections are that when I am thinking in language it's not really language there's just like an occasional Wordle flit along and I know what I want to say and then I can express it somehow something sometimes either internally or externally but if it's the same for you then that suggests that there's some kind of language use going on in there that isn't even using the articulated language system and it's just kind of hovering in there somewhere occasionally bits and pieces come out and if you try you can say them to yourself or say about side and you know when you get it right which means that you must have meant something and the articulation that you produce can match what you met but what you meant is in some internal language and furthermore even if you take up if you look at the part of language very small part that's external you know like what we're doing a very small part of that is communication in a seriousness I'm a lot of us just setting up social relations of telling jokes to your friends you know passing time it's not communication in a meaningful sense of the word communication so I think it's just a big mistake to identify communication with language first I wanna say thank you for coming here dr. Chomsky it's an honor to have you um you talked a lot about the the limits of our understanding and I was I was curious about we believe the connection is between our limits of understanding and as far as human happiness goes specifically do you feel that it's antithetical the more that we understand to to us to be happy like on an existential level on is hedonism not compatible with us being comfortable with our existence I mean I like is it is healing is necessary rather than interrogating nature as far as it can possibly go well I think these are really important issues after a lot of our lives the way we act but you know they're way beyond the bounds of scientific inquiry we can reflect about them think about them maybe clarify some of the ideas that are involved in them but it's it's just you know science can deal with simple things it get anywhere when you get to more complex things it's it's hard you know it's even hard to deal with simple things and try to explain them and when you do you find all sorts of surprises like for example you find that our only intelligible concept of the world is wrong yes returning to the issue of language and communication it seems to me anyway less likely that the same you made would be true that 99% of community of languages in fact not communication and that might be the case today but I would see that more it's kind of a social bright by-product that maybe we have more time for introspection we live in a society where speaking is I guess less common less necessary but it seems however that language would have developed specifically as a means of communication and that earlier humans in whom language was developing wouldn't have spent would have spent more time speaking to each other because it seems like that would be one the the most instant form of interaction and entertainment and there just be less time for introspection so I just wanted to see how you would feel about have hunter-gatherer tribes as far as we know they're just like us remembered language hasn't evolved at all for 50 thousand years since humans left Africa a small group left Africa spread all over the world and we're all basically identical if you take a an infant from an Amazonian tribe that hasn't had other human contact for twenty thousand years and bring it up in Baltimore it'll speak street baltimore english end up here studying physics no and conversely so it doesn't seem to be there are individual differences among humans we don't see many significant detectable group differences so nothing's happened for about fifty thousand years if you go back about fifty thousand years before that there isn't really any evidence that there was language I mean that of course we're beyond as I said you know you don't have you don't have comparative evidence you don't have fossil evidence but you do have artifacts and in fact there was a big kind of creative explosion that took place somewhere in that window and say maybe thirty five thousand years ago a sudden explosion of symbolic representation complex social structures observations parent observations of astronomical events all kinds of things just suddenly happened in general it's usually assumed you know we don't direct evidence that this must have been connected with the sudden emergence of language and notice that it's very sudden in evolutionary times now you can double or triple the numbers it's still a flick of an eyelash in evolutionary time so somewhere in a very small window something happened and then nothing happened afterwards that part were pretty pretty sure of well what would have happened whatever happened unless there's some mechanism that biology hasn't discovered yet whatever happened would be some rewiring of the brain some mutation that caused a rewiring of the brain and that rewiring of the brain would have given this mechanism this computational mechanism that allows these things to happen but a rewiring of the brain a mutation takes place in an individual not in a group ok that's obvious so this happened to somebody you know some person and some small hunter-gatherer group underwent this change that person had the capacity to do what we all do internally but without the externalization because there was nobody to talk there's no reason to think it was externalized at all just that whatever is going on in our heads that is pre-linguistic that we get bits and pieces of it when we think about that would have been available for one person well you know if there's any selective advantage to that say ability to plan and so on it could have been it could proliferate in a small group there over generations it could be enough people who had that so it would make some sense to interact but then at that point you get you would get externalization but externalize ation is a very tough process there's this internal thing in the head which developed without any external pressures okay because there were no selectional pressures on it almost by definition so it's kind of like a snowflake you know something that just develops because that's the way nature works if you have this thing in the head you have a sensory motor system which has been around for hundreds of thousands of years and has nothing to do with it I have to match them up that's a complicated process in fact that's where practically as far as we know that's where all the components all the complexity of languages when you learn a language that's what you learn a child is acquiring a language that's what they acquire but nobody teaches you you don't learn the kinds of things I've mentioned the beginning which are probably just part of the way the snowflake works so which then of course once you have the externalization you could have some kind of communication so you know even from a from the minimal evolutionary speculation and of course it's all speculation it looks like a plausible scenario it incidentally has looked that way to some of the leading evolutionary biologists too it's hard to think of an alternative in fact so yeah it does kind of sound intuitive that people ought to be communicating all the time well so they need language work but like a lot of obvious things when you look it just doesn't seem to be true I don't have to do this but I think we're going to take two more questions because we're running up against time constraints in this room so one and two and I'm sorry to disappoint the rest of you but that's the way life is okay one um again I wanted to thank you for coming today it was very informative um I did another question about when you were talking about the limits of the human mind um I study environmental science here and outside of any of my science courses one thing I've kind of taken from that is that there's to me I don't really believe in a limit to what we can do to become more sustainable people of humanity so to me I really don't see a limit in the actions that we can take towards that and I've kind of apply that to other things in life that really as humans we don't have a limit in what we can do so when you said that there that you there might be some sort of limit to the human mind my first thought was I don't like that I didn't agree but um as I thought about it more I thought it was an incredibly good point and um I started think more about like if the actions we take are necessarily completely limited by what our mind can do and basically what I'm trying to ask is if there is a limit to that the human mind can do and can comprehend does that limit human action both for right now and in the future well we're assuming no evolution you know that we say this organism not some other organism and the timescale of evolution is too long to worry about we'll have destroyed ourselves before that so assume that we stay this organism we know perfectly well there are limits to what we can do physically like we can't fly like Eagles say okay and if there are also limits to our cognitive capacities that really shouldn't surprise anyone it would just say we're biological organisms not angels furthermore instead of being unhappy about it you should be happy it now because if we weren't constrained suppose there were no constraints on intelligence it would be as if there were no constraints on physical growth if there were no constraints on the way a fetus could develop that you couldn't get any organization or structure you get some kind of amoeboid creature that couldn't survive or do anything and it's exactly the same with cognitive capacities if there were no constraints you couldn't learn anything couldn't acquire anything you couldn't discover anything you just be flailing around randomly so we ought to be very happy that their constraints because there's kind of a logical connection between a scope and limits if you don't have limits you also have any scope you can't same with you know physical growth it's because the fact that there are certain limits on what you can be enables you to become what you did become there weren't any limits you'd been you know the term so could grow anyway be anything nothing last question hi dr. Chomsky Thanks I'm a English as a second language teacher and I was wondering what you think about this pertaining to second language acquisition like language versus communication and with your first language it's really easy to know when a person knows it it seems like one of those obvious and simple things but when would you say somebody knows a second or third language I mean is it when they can communicate or can they say ungrammatical things that a native speaker wouldn't say and they still know a language it's very hard to know what saying a child knows in his first language it's very hard to discover I mean it turns out that kids know a great deal beyond anything they're exhibiting that's been shown over the years of study of child language acquisition the we don't know exactly how much it is but certainly an infant knows far more than it's exhibiting you can show that by careful experimentation Lila kleitman and other people have done this and there's even some evidence it's not very powerful and you can't really investigate it any further but there's some evidence that by the age of about maybe eighteen or twenty months a child may know virtually the whole language the reason for believing that is cases of the Helen Keller type Helen Keller got a perfect fluency extremely fluent she lost sight and hearing at about 20 months and she invented for herself we now know this is a recent discovery from old pictures and video tapes as she had discovered for herself a method of teaching the deafblind that was later invented and used for teaching the deafblind it's both the DOMA it's a system where the person puts their hand their hand on somebody's face like this and the fingers feel but you know the motions of the facial musculature and the thumb feels the vocal cord that's a miniscule amount of information but it's enough to acquire in Helen Keller split case essentially perfect fluency well that's been studied a little now systematically and there aren't a lot there's an interdimentional results have come out which haven't been published because there aren't enough cases actually my wife was did the main work on this I might think the there are they found that they have pretty there are cases of very great success for people who lost sight and hearing roughly about Helen Keller's age not that about it would not say if there was 16 months when they lost it they get no recovery now there aren't a lot of cases so you can't be sure and fortunately there aren't going to be any more cases this was all spinal meningitis which is now curable but you know that's what it looks like there may be more indirect ways to investigate it but it's at least suggestive that the children very young children have a tremendous capacity and there's experimental evidence work so I wouldn't say that in the case of first language learners we know what they know we don't we it's hard like most of these things in the case of second language learners I think there's a practical question that concerns you what are you trying to achieve in second language acquisition if your goal is get them to be able to communicate well of course you'll test ability to communicate thank you very much you

Channel: TheEthanwashere

Views: 101,801

Rating: 4.876543 out of 5

Keywords: Noam Chomsky Grammar

Id: wMQS3klG3N0

Length: 85min 58sec (5158 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 09 2012